HOH Top 60 Goaltenders of All Time (2024 Edition) - Round 2, Vote 2

[rmartin65]

I'm curious where you sit on the 1910-1925 cohort. I've been open that all the reading I've done has solidified Vezina at 1. I'm starting to lean towards Lehman at 2.

The Vezina praise in his career is really really high.

It's just outside of my research interests (hockey stops for me at 1909- I am the inverse @Michael Farkas ), so I am cautious about speaking too confidently on the matter.

But I have Vezina a pretty solid #1. I used to have Benedict next, but the pre-consolidation project and @ResilientBeast 's arguments have me also leaning towards Lehman. Then I think we have to look at Gardiner, Holmes, and Hainsworth. To clarify how I interpreted your question- I am talking about those who played the bulk of the 1910-1925 timeframe. I'm not talking about guys who played at a high level at either fringe of this timeframe (Riley Hern being an example of someone at one temporal end, Alec Connell at the other).

And, of course, I'd be remiss not to mention that guys like LeSueur and Moran also played a significant chunk of the 1910-1925 time frame. If we give the O6 goalies credits for defending their nets for so long, I don't see why we shouldn't for the early era guys as well, as both of them kept their spots for over a decade, despite talent gradually becoming more and more consolidated.

But to tie it back to players eligible this round- Vezina is high on my list this round. Benedict is not.

 

[overpass]

Not a lot of discussion on Belfour this week, and I realize he'll probably be back next week, but I just wanted to say I have him top 3 this week. I think he was very close to Roy and Brodeur in his prime, maybe as good. And he was very good for a long time too, if not as long as his greater contemporaries.

I didn't see much of Belfour for most of his career, except for the Finals. I thought he was done after his down 01-02, and didn't like the Leafs signing him. Then I got to watch him regularly in 02-03 and 03-04 and I changed my mind very quickly. He was excellent. I had thought Curtis Joseph was good, but Belfour was clearly a cut above. Very sound and in control, great shot stopping and rebound control, played the puck well.

Baseball had basically the same pro league that it has today before the first recognized hockey was played. No players that played before that pro league have been inducted to my knowledge. Essentially, it would be like if the HHOF only took players from the NHA and forward.

Yes, that's how I see it. Baseball history is more or less considered to start at 1876 with the National League. Which would be like hockey history starting in 1917. Yes the NHA was basically the same league, but baseball ignores the 1871-76 National Association which had some of the same teams as the NL.

The hockey Hall of Fame recognized an unusual number of early players compared to other North American HOFs. Likely because it was created less than 40 years after the start of pro hockey, and influential voters like James T Sutherland had been watching hockey back to the amateur era. No baseball HOF voters in 1937 had watched Cal McVey or Levi Meyerle in the 1870s NA, or Joe Start in 1860s Brooklyn.

I enjoy reading about pre-NHL hockey but it was clearly in an early stage of development.

 

[ContrarianGoaltender]

I wanted to compile some of my thoughts on talent pools over time and era representation before the end of the week.

Era Bias

First, if anybody thinks that comments about the possible overrepresentation of old goalies right now is "era bias" or being unreasonably harsh on earlier eras, well, I guess you must think every top 100 list this forum has ever done was horrendously biased then too. After all, if you look at the top 25 skaters on the most recent top 100 list done by this forum, only three of the top 25 skaters were born before 1921, and only one of them was born before 1900.

In this round of 9 goalies, representing our #7-15 spots all-time, six of them were born before 1921, and two of them were born before 1900.

If our top 15 had the same proportions as the top 25 skaters, we'd have a maximum of two goalies born before 1921.

On the flip side, 11 out of the top 25 skaters were born after 1952. We have three already on the list, and one more eligible here, which means we're 2-3 behind the expected representation from the top skaters list.

Now, obviously those are somewhat arbitrary cutoffs. I picked the top 25, you can look at the top 20 or the top 50 or whatever and you'll get some variation in the percentages. And we definitely shouldn't be bound to quotas, we should expect to see some weird stuff happen with the kind of outliers we're talking about on an all-time list (things like having the top four share only two birth years between them).

However, I think the same overall point will remain with any given sample, which is that "we have to be fair to all eras" is not really a compelling defence here, because we're overrepresenting early eras goalies by 2-3x compared to skaters. That's probably not "fair" even if you think that goalies and skaters developed at the same rate. If you think that early goalie development was slower, well, I honestly think you're completely justified in massively breaking with the HOH "conventional wisdom" when it comes to the pre-1921 birth year goalies.

My Attempt At an Objective Measure of the Goalie Talent Pool Over Time

I tried to find what I could use as a reasonable proxy for the talent pool development, and I settled on the percentage of NHL games played that come from goalies born in Ontario or Quebec.

Grouping similar time periods, we get these rough eras:

1918-1927: 96%
1928-1935: 87%
1936-1954: 40%
1955-1968: 60%
1969-1983: 83%
1984-1990: 62%
1991-2004: 49%
2006-2010: 38%
2011-2021: 23%
2022-2024: 13%

To me that seems to roughly track what we would probably subjectively intuit about the goalie talent pool. Almost exclusively ON/QC goalies early on (it would be a bit less if we included other pro leagues like the PCHA, but would still be overwhelming from ON/QC since even the two best Pacific Coast goalies in Lehman and Holmes were from Ontario). A very sharp influx of goalies from outside Central Canada starting in the mid-'30s (which does actually seem to support the @Michael Farkas theory of a goaltending improvement kicking in right around then). Settling in at a fairly consistent level over the Original Six, then spiking after expansion, to a level that is actually very close to the rate from 1928-1935. (Exactly how sure are we that Charlie Gardiner's NHL competition was much worse than Ken Dryden's? Seems to me both of them were pretty much facing competition almost exclusively from two provinces.)

From the mid-'80s to early '90s expansion, we're about back to Original Six levels, and then we see a drop through the Dead Puck Era, a further drop after 2005, and then since 2010-11 Central Canadian goalies have been a borderline endangered species (which I think pretty clearly reflects a drop in that talent pool compared to prior eras, especially Quebec).

The only thing that doesn't entirely track for me is that I would rate 1955-1968 as quite a bit stronger than 1936-1954, both in terms of elite talent and in depth of talent, but this metric doesn't actually support that view.

Depending on how deep we want to go, we could even add in some of the other pro leagues for the earlier eras where goalie spots were very limited. On the other hand, since we're focusing on outliers here in a Top 60 list, it's probably worth focusing on the very top of the talent pool anyway, and some of the post-expansion years might even benefit from a narrowing down of the sample (say, to goalies with 40+ GP only or something like that). I'm guessing the overall conclusions likely won't change that much either way, though.

This solidifies to me that my top 2 this round are going to be Tretiak and Brimsek. Then I'm particularly interested in Dryden vs. Gardiner, with Belfour also in the mix for the next spots.